tag: University of California Riverside

Silicon spintronics
Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, developed new methods to detect signals from spintronic components made of low-cost metals and silicon. Spintronic devices generate little heat, use relatively minuscule amounts of electricity, and would require no energy to maintain data in memory. However, previously developed spintronic devices depend on complex struc... » read more

Turning bottles into batteries
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside used waste glass bottles and a low-cost chemical process to create nanosilicon anodes for high-performance lithium-ion batteries.
Billions of glass bottles end up in landfills every year, prompting the researchers to ask whether silicon dioxide in waste beverage bottles could provide high purity silicon ... » read more

Thermal diode
Engineers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln developed a nano-thermal-mechanical device, or thermal diode, which uses heat as an alternative energy source that would allow computing at ultra-high temperatures.
"If you think about it, whatever you do with electricity you should (also) be able to do with heat, because they are similar in many ways," said Sidy Ndao, assistan... » read more

New approach to switches
According to the National Resource Defense Council, Americans waste up to $19 billion annually in electricity costs due to always-on digital devices in the home that suck power even when they are turned off.
With that in mind, a team from University of Utah devised a new kind of switch for electronic circuits that uses solid electrolytes such as copper sulfide to ... » read more

Portabella batteries
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. The current industry standard for rechargeable lithium-ion battery anodes is synthetic graphite, which comes with a high cost of manufacturing because it requires tedious pu... » read more

Speeding up quantum computing
A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences demonstrated a new quantum computation scheme in which operations occur without a well-defined order. The researchers used this effect to accomplish a task more efficiently than a standard quantum computer. Moreover, these ideas could set the basis for a new form of quantum c... » read more

Improving battery performance with sand
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering have created a lithium ion battery that outperforms the current industry standard by three times using sand as the key material.
The researchers, who said this is a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally-friendly way to produce high performance lithium ion battery a... » read more